Both C++ and C# have the concept of virtual functions. These are functions which always invoke the most heavily derived implementation, even if called from a pointer to the base class. However, the two languages differ on the semantics of virtual functions during object construction and destruction. C# objects exist as their final type before co...

I was going to write about why C# doesn't have "const", but Stan Lippman already discussed this in A Question of Const, so now I don't have to. (And another example of synchronicity: After I wrote up this item and tossed it into the queue, Eric Gunnerson took up the topic as well.

It's proxy season, which means I've been reading through proxy statement after proxy statement. The proxy voting rules for Allstate aren't very democratic. Scroll down to "How votes are counted and discretionary voting authority": The thirteen nominees who receive the most votes will be elected to the open directorships even if they get ...

During the development of Windows 95, a placeholder dialog was added with the title, "In order to demonstrate our superior intellect, we will now ask you a question you cannot answer." The dialog itself asked a technical question that you need a brain the size of a planet in order to answer. (Okay, your brain didn't need to be quite ...

My entry about Good-Bye, Lenin! appears to have turned into a discussion of formal and informal terms of address in various languages and cultures. Sweden effectively abolished the "du"/"ni" distinction in the 1970's during the so-called "du-reform", getting rid of the formal "ni" and having everybody address each other as "du" - even the ...

Microsoft Active Accessibilty is the technology that exposes information about objects on the screen to accessibility aids such as screen readers. But that doesn't mean that only screen readers can use it. Here's a program that illustrates the use of Active Accessibility at the most rudimentary level: Reading text. There's much more to Active ...

Fact-checking? What's fact-checking? I found it on the Internet! Wired News has a story on various people and news agencies being fooled by Onion articles. This used to be news, but now it's so common it may end up relegated to just a counter. "Number of people fooled by Onion articles: n+1".

Just because you can't see the error path doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Here's a snippet from a book on C# programming, taken from the chapter on how great exceptions are. Notice how much cleaner and more elegant [this] solution is. Cleaner, more elegant, and wrong. Suppose an exception is thrown during CreateIndexes(). The GenerateDatab...

The National (US) Football League adopted a 15-yard penalty for pre-planned celebrations, such as last year's "phone call from the end zone" or 2002's "autographed football". Apparently, the existing monetary fines weren't having much of an effect on players with multi-million-dollar contracts. (Surprised?) So now the league is going t...

People have discovered that the "natural" C# loop construct is fractionally slower than the corresponding manual loop: The first thing that needs to be said here is that The performance difference is almost certainly insignificant. Don't go running around changing all your foreach loops into corresponding for loops thinking that your progra...